Can infrastructural development be both productive and public? Inhabiting Industry investigates how renewable energy infrastructure can be designed to function productively while generating public value. The project explores how the by-products of energy, such as surplus materials, space, and heat, can be reused in ways that bring value to both the industry and the communities the infrastructure is placed within. The project is set within Wicklow Port, a working harbour now designated as the onshore operations base for the Codling offshore wind farm. This scale of new industry risks cutting off existing uses in the port and distancing the town from its waterfront. The project asks how ports and energy hubs, which are usually closed off and highly secure, could instead be rethought not only as energy storage but as active, engaged parts of the community. Material research was central to the design. Sand dredged for the construction of the wind farm is reused in two main ways. It is cast into low-carbon concrete blocks with lime mortar, and it becomes the medium for thermal sand batteries, a system that can store renewable energy as heat for long periods of time. The port’s existing silos are adapted to house these batteries, giving them new life while retaining their symbolic role in the town. The design is organised around an industrial colonnade that frames a public square and links together the workshops, offices and a semi-covered fishing market. The colonnade acts as a threshold between public and private, but not a barrier. Heated benches and small hotspots powered by the sand batteries create places for people to meet and interact across the square, allowing people to interact directly with the renewable energy. The thesis proposes a new type of industrial architecture, one that is both productive and civic. Inhabiting Industry suggests that infrastructure can play an active role in public life while reusing resources and supporting long-term sustainable design.
Project Tag: Adaptive Reuse
From Extraction to Regeneration: Reimagening Post-Industrial Landscapes
My thesis is situated in the future afterlife scenario of a post-industrial landscape, namely Mungret Quarry and Cement Factory.
The project seeks to reveal human domination over nature and the objectified measure of land as an exploitable resource. I propose to hand the site back to nature and transform it into a bio-campus.
Reinhabiting the Backlands
This thesis explored the adaptive reuse of derelict sites in town centres to create functional homes, aiming to revitalise urban cores and attract residents back into these areas. The project began with an in-depth analysis of Narrow West Street in Drogheda, examining the potential retrofit of buildings in varying states of dilapidation.
Oscar Newman’s ‘Defensible Space Theory’ was a key influence throughout the design process, shaping a concept that prioritised community, safety, and privacy. These ideas informed the integration of semi-public spaces and defined thresholds, guiding residents from public streets into private dwellings while fostering a sense of ownership and security.
The design development involved testing two primary concepts. The first proposed demolishing rear extensions to accommodate a modern version of mixed-use developments. The second approach embraced the strategic reuse of the existing built fabric. This scheme aimed to preserve the site’s character while introducing communal indoor and outdoor areas that encourage interaction and shared responsibility among residents. The final design presents a vision for sustainable urban regeneration, one that respects historical context while creating a liveable, defensible, and connected neighbourhood.
A Palimpsest of Renewal
This thesis addresses the longed-for revitalisation of neglected Georgian heritage buildings through a mode of material sorting and reuse. The site sits at the lower end of the Georgian Newtown Pery Grid, founded by a cluster of dereliction within the city. Jesuit Lane becomes an organised, brick-vaulted matrix in which workshops that contribute toward a self-repairing city can take place. It integrates existing institutions such as the Sacred Heart Church and the Limerick Tutorial College, embedding itself within an already active civic fabric.
The programme unfolds within a realm of brick vaults extracted from the very city in which it stands. It includes educative and reparative workshops, a large church assembly hall, and material storage facilities, all emphasising the reuse of salvaged and redundant materials sourced from surrounding areas. Redundant materials become the central subject of the project, shifting from waste to resource. The site operates as both a hub and a form of spolia — a place where fragments of the city are gathered, catalogued, and reintroduced — enticing the city to repair itself through incremental, smaller-scale acts of intervention.
This thesis explores architecture as a provocation, or re-provocation, of our inner visionary selves. It questions current approaches to renewal within the built environment and challenges the tendency toward replacement over repair. This response lies in the mode of sensitive material sorting, with particular attention given to materials already embedded within the existing fabric. By recognising the latent value in what is already present, the project seeks to step toward a more sustainable architectural output. Ultimately, it aims to portray a world in which one empathises with the material before them — where architecture begins not with extraction, but with recognition, care, and reuse. The city becomes self-repairing.
DNA: Dublin Network Architecture
Post Graduate Architectural Thesis Report: An organisational typology and transit masterplan to provide for tomorrow’s mass transit in dublin’s city centre while conserving the historic and cultural districts in the context of global climate change and conflict.
Finding Value in the Invaluable
This thesis is an exploration into the sequence of spatial experiences which is afforded to the individual by their built environment. It is an investigation of the urban condition, ideas of procession and promenade, and adaptation in an endeavour to curate a responsive architectural attitude to designing within our urban fabric.
My area of study is Limerick city centre. I investigate the character of the city realm and the experience of the everyday. This is a place plagued by urban decay and vacancy; however, it is also rich in its history and design. The Georgian grid is a renowned example of urban planning and is considered a special area of conservation. This thesis examines building heritage, conservation, and dereliction in Limerick city.
The chosen site forms part of a Georgian block in Limerick city. It contains the derelict buildings of nos. 34-41 Catherine Street, and their associated brown-field site in the block interior. The site borders Glenworth lane to the northeast, Catherine street to the south east, the Mallow Street terraces to the south west, and a laneway from Malow Street to the northwest. The block in which it sits faces onto O’Connell Street, a primary thoroughfare in Limerick, and its location is an area of transition between primarily commercial and residential parts of the city.
The proposal of this thesis aims to create a piece of urban fabric which enables a richness of interface between the human and their build environment. The intervention strives to enhance the spatial experiences of the city-goer as they move through the city and provide public spaces within for city and community happenings to take place.
Tradisiún a Chaomhnú – an teanga, an cultúr agus na healaíona
This thesis investigates the role that architecture has or can have in preserving cultural ideas that strengthen our expression and sense of identity. When thinking about our féiniúlacht, who we are, we often think of our mother-tongue and the heritage of ceol, scéalaíocht, filíocht, and béaloideas. It is our language that evokes a sense of place, Béal Bán, the white mouth, Cloichear, a place of stones or An Daingean, the fort.
My area of interest lies on the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, the Gaeltacht where I grew up. This place where my identity is rooted. A place that has provided me with a connection and moulded my understanding of what the essence of Irish people is and has been for generations. In Dingle town, there’s a building which provoked an interest within me. An art deco façade amongst the patchwork of coloured townhouses in the fishing town. The Phoenix Cinema, one of the last old Irish cinemas of its kind which was, until recently, a space for people to gather and experience an interpretation of culture from around the world.
I will be taking the typology of the Old Irish Cinema as an existing infrastructure that lies empty within many towns scattered across our island and look to repurpose these spaces that once acted as cultural hearths within our communities. Initially, these were places of film, of dance, of music and of interaction. We must reignite these spaces to allow them to be places of cultural importance once again. A place where language, song, dance, and lore can thrive, where culture can flourish once more.
A place to house Irish Identity
Curated Decay: Interventions to Stabilize Derelict Structures
The thesis project is centered around the illustrious Iveagh Markets located in the Liberties. The owners of this remarkable site have long held a deep reverence for its structure, perhaps even to the point of being overly cautious about making any alterations. However, the project aims to strike a balance between preservation and revitalization by exploring the concept of “stabilizing” derelict structures. We delve into the realm of architectural interventions that not only introduce new materials and spatial elements but also pay homage to the layers of time and the previous inhabitants who have left their mark on this cherished space. Our approach can be likened to that of a skilled gardener tending to a garden, infused with meticulous care and thoughtful consideration.
At the heart of our project lies the fundamental goal of rejuvenating derelict structures by envisioning alternative methods to “stabilize” them. The excavation of the ground floor slab of the market exposed ruins from 17th-century Dublin but also compromised the structural integrity of the columns holding up the balcony and roof structure. Over the next 23 years, rain pours down through the ceiling, and plants grow wild reaching out towards the sun. The scaffolding structure proposed integrates itself to provide structural support and also a spatial function. It rethinks how the former dry market hall can be used as a “Chameleon” Space which changes its function based on how platforms can be installed on the scaffolding structures and bamboo blinds can control access and light.
Remaining faithful to this guiding principle, we carefully select materials that are both easy to install and maintain. By doing so, we ensure the longevity of our interventions while harmoniously integrating them within the existing fabric of the building. Our comprehensive study encompasses various aspects such as structure and function, allowing us to propose interventions that enhance the site’s overall integrity. Through this project, we aspire to honor the essence of the Iveagh Markets while breathing new life into its dormant spaces.
HAMMOND LANE | Cultural Disassembly
The ongoing draining of spirit, life and culture of the markets area while often acknowledged, its material demolition continues covertly. Considering economic constraints, context, climate and the direction of the area, this thesis refers to cultural disassembly as both an ongoing situation and as an act of protest.
mining, borrowing, salvaging,
repairing, transforming, storing,
re-using and reimagining.
a celebration of material, process and the spirit of the city’s very fabric.
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This thesis critiques the Dublin 7 markets area under the theme of Cultural Disassembly.
Dissecting this as two readings, |1| in reference to the current situation whereby the embodied cultural significance of the markets as a wholesale, almost industrial area is waning, |2| accepting this reality and striving to bring light on the process of its material demolition, deconstruction or rather disassembly, as a cultural practice.
The vehicle to investigate this further lies in the site of HAMMOND LANE, a site historically linked to manufacture and contemporarily to vacancy and decay. Reimagining a baron, publicly owned void as a machine of process, repair and maintenance in the interest of material reuse.
Here, the relationship of manufacture and civic necessity is interrogated as
foundry, workshop, school, library, market.’
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The fabric of the building itself attempts to limit addition, only through the re-use of three nearby warehouses. Various dimensions of re-use are questioned from re-purposing of demolition rubble, to the reprocessing of steel structure and building components.
Drawing and modelling largely focus on these specific additions, and the process behind each. Secondly, on the relationship of the civic and the industrial through a reimagination of place feeding from the surrounding local historical culture as a market and trading area and the industrial heritage of the site itself.’
CIANOBAIR: The Architecture of Remote Work in Donegal
The thesis explores the emerging role of remote working infrastructure in the revitalization of Irish towns.
Often interpreted as an isolating activity, the thesis proposes the reinterpretation of remote work as a collective endeavour: one with the capacity to challenge, reconfigure, and ultimately reform notions of how we live today. Situated at a critical juncture with regards to how we might move forward, the thesis asserts the question:
What is the architecture of remote work going to be?
In response to recent government policy acknowledging the ‘remote working hub’ as infrastructure, the thesis consciously interrogates and reframes the role of these infrastructures to shed light on how they could adopt a broader role in addressing the emerging needs of Irish Towns.
This is explored through a situated case study in the town of Ramelton, Co. Donegal that reconceptualizes the infrastructure as a responsive civic amenity: one where social, cultural and community programs have been integrated alongside co-working spaces in a critique of the infrastructure’s homogenous commercial role. This amenity is spatialized through the adaptive re-use of former warehouses at The Quay in Ramelton. The infrastructure has been translated through an approach that enables flexible appropriation of the existing fabric and emphasizes the social role of work in the life of Irish towns.
The thesis aims to construct a dialogue with regards to the role of public infrastructure; aligning broader social and environmental ambitions with specific architectural considerations through policy, and the evolving role of what it means to live and work in Irish towns. This dialogue advocates for a responsive approach to the implementation of these infrastructures where they deeply engage with the affordances of their status as public infrastructure.